While shifting its focus on tertiary
levels of education and health, the federal government has vowed to transfer the
responsibilities of managing primary and secondary education sectors to its
federating units in the budget speech presented by Dr Abdul Hafeez Sheikh for
the next financial year 2010-11. Finance Minister said the federal government
has restricted its roles in the social sectors limiting itself generally to
tertiary levels of health and education with major responsibilities of these
sectors shifted to the provinces.

The budgetary allocation for the
tertiary education only constitutes 73 per cent of the total allocations for
education affairs and services. Total estimated allocation for 2010-11 for
education is Rs34.5 billion as compared with Rs31.5 billion revised estimates of
2009-10 while tertiary education got the budgetary allocation of Rs25.2 billion
as against Rs23.3 billion earlier.

The state of education sector in the
country is abysmal because of mainly lack of funds. Not all pre-primary,
primary, secondary, and tertiary education sectors are contributing significant
shares in the economic developments of the country. Therefore, the need of high
fund allocations overall to this economically critical sector cannot be denied.
However, that what should be the scale to measure the intensity of needs of
particular subsectors is debatable. In Pakistan's context, some educationists
call for unshared focus on the developments of primary education that they think
can directly reduce the poverty incidence by a large degree. But, others'
viewpoints equally carry substance who say developing higher schooling as well
as higher education sector can give boost to local industries lacking a pull to
localisation.

Education is important for the economic
mobilisation. Unfortunately, successive governments neglected the sector that is
evident from uncompetitive and underserved students of mainly public-run
education institutions. What one can call it apathy of the government is
manifested in the poor state of public sector education institutions as compared
to the properly funded private sector.

In this federal budget, Rs3.1 billion
has been allocated for pre-primary and primary education affairs services,
showing an increase of 10 per cent from Rs2.88 billion revised estimate of FY10.
Government has increased allocation to secondary education to Rs4.2 billion from
Rs3.8 billion. Allocation to tertiary education was Rs25 billion as against Rs23
billion revised for budget 2009-10.

According to latest statistics of
ministry of education, there are 256,088 education institutions in the country
with a total enrolment of 37 million students. Seventy per cent (182,477) belong
to public sector and 73,611 to private sector. Public sector education
institutions of various categories account for 67 per cent (25 million) of the
total enrolments while private sector has 12 million students. Total teaching
staffs were recorded at 1.3 million, out of which 56 per cent in public and 44
per cent in private. Total enrolment at pre-primary stage is 7.4 million. There
are 156,592 primary schools in the country and 89 per cent in public sector. Out
of total 320,611 middle schools, 121,052 in public sector. Similarly, government
runs 9,911 high schools out of 23,964. Forty per cent of 3,213 higher secondary
schools and colleges belong to public sector; 1,202 degree colleges are of
government. There are 124 universities in the country, of which 68 are in public
sector. Total enrolment in the universities is 741,092 and noticeably 86 per
cent (637,037) are in public sector universities.

The enrolment ratio is overall
education sector is not encouraging and in case of higher education, this
becomes more discouraging especially when Pakistan is acclaimed of having a
significant numbers of youth. UNDP estimated more than 60 per cent of Pakistanis
fall under the age of 25 years. In this context, funds realignment towards
tertiary education is appropriate since lack of government funds would result in
further deterioration of crumbling education system in the country. A sizeable
portion of the population depends on state supports to get education. Hopefully,
increase in allocations may improve the decaying public sector education short
of motivated teachers and straitjacketed curricula, poor infrastructure, and
aimless education standards. However, primary education and secondary education
can involve people who could not attend primary schools let alone colleges and
universities in the mainstream.

Dr. Abdul Hafeez Sheikh in the budget
speech said that the government would develop innovative scheme for benefiting
the poor. The government will start health insurance cover programme with
Rs25,000 per family per year for hospitalisation. It is obvious that a certain
premium should be paid by the insured to get the covers. Even if it is not
likely to happen as it is usual in group insurance in public and private sector
companies with deduction of insignificant amount out of salaries, the cover is
too little to bear the high costs of hospitalisations for a year. Most
importantly, this cover will more likely be for the government employees, so
obviously majority of non-government employees drawing Rs7000 per month will let
pass the yet needed health benefits. Increase in workforce of lady health
workers to 104,000 from 90,000 may extend health services to more underserved
areas if meritocratic and not political recruitments take place. The government
has allocated Rs7.2 billion for the health affairs and services, an increase of
12.3 per cent over a revised estimate of Rs6.7 billion.

PPP-led government under the 7th NFC
Award has stretched the resources to the provinces from Rs655 billion in the
ongoing financial year to Rs1033 billion for the budget of coming year.
Provinces will receive Rs373 billion as development expenditures from the
federal government. While this is more than 80 per cent raise over this year's
Rs200 billion, it is now on the discretion of provinces that how they allocate
this funds and to which sectors. Health and education, no need to say, should be
priorities for healthy and wealthy people.